I'm Not Scared
The Italian kids idling their summer away in "I'm Not Scared" like to taunt each other with dares. The oldest ones are about 10, and the punk with the nastiest mouth likes to dare his playmates to do humiliating or dangerous stunts. He instructs a fat girl to take off her clothes, which she angrily starts to do when the eldest-seeming boy, Michele (Giuseppe Christiano), steps in.
He takes a new dare: a walk on a beam across the rafters high up in an abandoned house, followed by a jump down from the window. As Michele and his friends bike home through the lush, endless sea of rippling grain (the film is set in 1978 around remote rural southern Italy), his little sister Mata loses her glasses. He goes back to look for them and finds something covering a cavernous hole. The cavern holds a boy, and the boy -- unwashed, chained up, and terrified -- obsesses Michele for the rest of the summer. Why is he down there? Who should Michele tell? What happens if he helps him escape?
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The title is right; Michele never seems afraid or even apprehensive, even while playing detective with both his parents (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon and Dino Abbrescia) and his father's uncouth friends, who crowd their rustic little home with ghostly cigarette smoke and ricocheting obscenities.
We know only what Michele discovers, so his surprises are ours. And we're drawn into his peril. Salvatores does well in keeping the film angled from the perspective of its 10-year-old protagonist. Yes, Sanchez-Gijon has the sexy maternal ruggedness you see only in Italian women, and Abbrescia plays a loving, shadowy man who means well by his children. But I swear I can remember them only as Michele does: as mama and papa.
You can see him struggling to reconcile the sudden moral complexity of these relationships. The missing kid is about Michele's age; would his father do the same to him? Is his mother an accomplice? Ultimately, though, he's only 10, and on a level native to most 10-year-olds, this business with his parents and the kidnapped boy becomes a harrowing sort of fun. "I'm Not Scared," which Niccolo Ammaniti adapted with Francesca Marciano from Ammaniti's novel, is Mark Twain synthesized with Edgar Allan Poe. Adventure is just a euphemism for danger. Michele tells his pal Salvatore (Stefano Biase) about the kidnapped boy in exchange for a tiny metal truck. And in one of the film's handful of casual ironies, Salvatore cashes in Michele's secret to his own father, who's in on this plot, too, for the chance to drive an actual truck.
Danger encroaches on the movie's golden landscape, boxing out the seductive beauty until the emotional suspense is laid completely bare. It's as if the unrelenting sun bleaches out the idylls. The gorgeousness that falls away leaves behind a boy's grand disillusionment.
Salvatores's last stateside hit, "Mediterraneo," won the 1991 foreign film Oscar. It was more a travel brochure than a movie. "I'm Not Scared" is equally languorous but it's far more rigorously conceived and contoured. With his dynamic face, Christiano is fierce and feeling, and his pluck makes a tough counterpoint to the movie's foreboding. (All the young actors are uniquely uninhibited.) Comparing Salvatores to Spielberg is apt. He's neither the sentimentalist nor the symbolist Spielberg is (although parental betrayal lurks beneath "I'm Not Scared," and bicycles are employed to transcendent, if earthbound, effect here as well), but the fraught atmosphere is certainly similar.
"I'm Not Scared" features the same dark, childhood thrill-seeking as Victor Erice's "Spirit of the Beehive" (1973), a movie not nearly as popular as "E.T" but one that matches Spielberg's movie enchantment for enchantment. There, two Castilian girls hunt for Frankenstein's monster, after the James Whale movie classic comes to town. "I'm Not Scared" is more operatic. Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.
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